Weegie Health

[Kurt]

Interesting article on our cousins in the west.

BBC News - Why is Glasgow the UK’s sickest city?

i worked for nearly a decade in the weeg after uni. I really liked the energy of the place especially as I was well sick of Edinburgh at the time. However, it has to be said that the diet of a lot of folk there ( and I'm talking about professional folk here so not a poverty issue) was woeful. When I think back to the team I worked with quite a disproportionally high number of them are now, sadly, brown bread.

The poor health of weegies is not a myth.

 

[PILTONSTANY]

Half the city being in single adult homes is an amazing stat,wonder what the rate in Edinburgh is?

 

[Jack]

Harry Burns is a very very clever and passionate man.

Scotland long held the sick man of Europe which we thankfully lost, not by much but it was a start.

I once asked the question, more than once actually but with no willingness for anyone to answer I lost the will to ask. That was if old Strathclyde was towed out into the Atlantic and sunk where would the rest of Scotland be in this European/world league of health?

Government spend is heavily weighted towards 'Strathclyde' to tackle the issues they have but so many have no wish to improve, generational deprivation compounding the death wish.

Doc: If you carry on the way you are you'll be dead by the time you're 55.

Patient 1: That's no bad doc ma dad died at 50.

Patient 2: OK I dinnae really want to live any longer than that anyway.

Among their peers dying to die is seen as a legitimate alternative to living the lives they live.

 

[Hampden_Hibby]

I once asked the question, more than once actually but with no willingness for anyone to answer I lost the will to ask. That was if old Strathclyde was towed out into the Atlantic and sunk where would the rest of Scotland be in this European/world league of health?

If yer maw had baws she'd be yer da.

 

[Peanut]

The article is interesting. Not that it reveals anything we didn't know already but because reading between the lines it is evident that decades and billions of pounds have been spent actioning social engineering policies in Glasgow, particularly in public health, that by and large have failed. This guy Burns doesn't have a clue why they've failed. He's just clutching at straws with this deindustrialisation theory. If I recall correctly, in Monty Python's brontosaurus theory the beast was thin at one end, much, much thicker in the middle and then thin again at the other end. Burns' theory is just thin all the way through.

His answer is 'to discover a sense of purpose and self-esteem'. Which I suspect means throwing even more public money at it. Glasgow's sense of entitlement coupled with their grip on Scottish politics and the media will ensure that's exactly what happens ...

... till the next time, and the next public outcry, and the next theory and the next (publicly funded) solution.

 

[Westside Green]

They're just doing their bit to ease the pension burden.

 

[Purple & Green]

If yer maw had baws she'd be yer da.

Last viewed a couple of days after the cup win.

Interesting all the old names that crop up when you search for something

 

[Alberta Hibee]

Is it the good old deep fried stuff coming back to haunt them?
Out here after a certain age it seems everyone gets put on oxygen mostly men I don't know if it's to do with the oil patch or the open face mines but there seems to be a helluva lot.Diet out here isn't that bad but with prices of groceries going up people will start to buy the cheapest food going just to eat..
My Das died at 50 in Scotland with a heart attack but in those days 1975 and before the diet had a lot to do with it and I believe that was eventually led to his demise.

 

[egb_hibs]

I remember reading somewhere that one factor - because, apart from anything else, it only applies to one demographic - is that descendants of those who fled the Irish famine literally age faster. I can’t remember the details but it’s along the lines that in people who experience prolonged and extreme trauma of that type, their bodies go into permanent fight or flight mode, which literally wears their bodies out, and that this becomes inheritable.

Now I’m not entirely convinced as everybody I knew growing up in Edinburgh, pretty much, came from the same stock and there didn’t seem to be the same problem. Meanwhile my Weegie relatives lived long lives, but notably that included teetotallers where a clutch of siblings went early with drink helping that along.

So I expect if it is a factor it’s one that interplays with others to be ‘activated’. On its own it certainly doesn’t explain the huns going as early as the Tims, but of course many of the former have family histories of extreme deprivation if not as extreme as outright famine. So I guess a version of the same thing could apply.

As an aside, I have noted on my travels you get similarly lethal diets in other harsh or miserable climates - consider Canadian poutine for example; hipster scran it may be but what could be more Scottish-like i essence than cheese and chips. Bad climates also produce alcohol abuse.

I remain convinced that Scotland’s people and culture are disfigured by its climate, and the west coast is even more miserable than the east. There are certainly more extreme climates in the developed world but I’m not sure there is a more depressing one, aside from parts of Russia (for instance, the aforementioned Canada provides viciously cold but dry and bright winters, and great summers versus our year round dreich).

It’s not fashionable enough, possibly because no one has yet found a way to call it racist, but Scotland’s climate has, I suspect, much to answer for.